Wednesday, March 26, 2014

On Monday, Mozilla appointed a new CEO who in 2008 donated $1000 to the Prop 8 campaign. Yesterday a boycott was announced by a married gay couple that runs a development company that produces products for Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Hampton Catlin, creator of Wikipedia
Mobile and CSS extension language Sass, said he would no longer develop
apps for Firefox after Eich's appointment. Catlin and his husband run a
development firm called Rarebit which makes a game called Color Puzzle
and was set to bring a dictionary app to Firefox Marketplace. In a blog
post, Catlin wrote: "As a married gay couple who are co-founders of this
venture, we have chosen to boycott all Mozilla projects. We will not
develop apps or test styles on Firefox any more. This is in protest of
the appointment of Brendan Eich to the position of CEO of the Mozilla
Foundation, where he had previously served as CTO. We will continue our
boycott until Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day
activities at Mozilla, which we believe is extremely unlikely after all
he’s survived and the continued support he has received from Mozilla.”

It wasn't until the Supreme Court overturned Prop 8 that the couple
married. Catlin was also able to sponsor a visa for his British husband
with the overturn of DOMA. The couple married at San Francisco City Hall
on the very day of the Prop 8 ruling, landing their story on the front
page of the New York Times. Read Catlin's blog post about the boycott and his open letter to Mozilla.

"I like the term 'homo'! I use it all the time – about myself and
others, although I also often use 'fag' as well. The gay thought-police
would be aghast, but the intent is what matters. Mine is mostly benign.
Mostly. But mainly, one great legacy of the gay community has been our
love of freedom, especially of speech. For centuries and decades, the
right to free speech was our only truly secure constitutional right. We
were always about enlarging what was sayable, rather than restricting
it. Banning 'homosexual' also reeks of insecurity. We are not so tender
we cannot handle a clinical, neutral term, or even a slur or the
re-appropriation of a slur. 'Queer' was one such reclamation, although
that’s much more pointed than 'homosexual' and certainly doesn’t reflect
how I feel about my orientation. There’s nothing queer about being
horny and falling in love or lust or getting married. They’re among the
most common activities known to humankind. But I sure don’t mind others
using it – and more and more heteros want to call themselves 'queer'
too. But my main objection to getting rid of 'homosexual' is that we
would lose a not-too-easily replaced non-euphemism." - Andrew Sullivan, writing in response to the New York Times article about the "vanishing" usage of "homosexual" by the media thanks to prodding by groups such as GLAAD.

Sullivan and I agree about "homosexual" but not quite for the same reasons (many of you here strongly disagreed with mine). He goes on to express blistering contempt for "LGBT."

God I hate that “word”. It describes
no single person; it cannot be spoken easily; it reeks of bullshit. No
one started using that word of their own accord as a way to describe
herself. It was created by leftists who believe that all oppressed
groups are primarilly defined by their oppression and that the very
different lives and identities of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and
transgender are somehow all one. I know it’s an effort at inclusion. I
appreciate the good intent. And if it had any wit or originality,
instead of sounding like a town in Croatia, I could live with it. But it
doesn’t.

I like LGBT - most of all for its writing utility as an umbrella term.
But while I grok why it's done, I do sometimes feel that the
ever-growing number of letters sometimes tacked onto the end of LGBT are
worthy of the eye-rolling it receives from inside our community and
mockery it gets from our enemies. Which takes me back to my appreciation
for the catch-all "queer," which to me simply means anybody who isn't
heterosexual.

The bodhisattva aspiration is an
everyday matter—everyday both in the sense of needing to be renewed as
each day passes, and in the sense of applying to simple tasks, to
ordinary actions motivated by a longing to reduce the difficulty and
increase the happiness of those with whom we share our lives.